This article is for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character.

For other versions

of the character see Versions of James Moriarty.

James Moriarty

Pd Moriarty by Sidney Paget

Vital statistics

Sex Male

Died 4 May, 1891

Nationality British

Family Colonel James Moriarty (brother)

Occupation Mathematician

Professor

Criminal mastermind

Behind the scenes

Appearances "The Final Problem"

The Valley of Fear

"His Last Bow" (mentioned)

"He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is

evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius,
a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He
sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a
thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them."

―Sherlock Holmes to Dr Watson speaking about Professor Moriarty

[src]

Professor James Moriarty, the arch-enemy of the famous Detective

Sherlock Holmes, a mathematics professor turned the world's only
consulting criminal. His genius is equal to, if not perhaps greater than,
Holmes himself.
Despite only appearing in two stories, Moriarty has been proven to be
the most dangerous of all criminals that Holmes has ever encountered.
In the short story "The Adventure of the Final Problem", during a fight
with Holmes above the Reichenbach Falls, Moriarty fell to his death.

Biography

Professor Moriarty's first appearance and his ultimate end occurred in

Doyle's story "The Final Problem", in which Holmes, on the verge of
delivering a fatal blow to Moriarty's criminal ring, is forced to flee to the
Continent to escape retribution. The criminal mastermind follows, and
the pursuit ends atop the Reichenbach Falls, during which, Moriarty falls
to his death while fighting with Holmes. During this story, Moriarty is
depicted as something of a Mafia Godfather: he protects nearly all of the
criminals of England in exchange for their obedience and a share in their
profits. Holmes, by his own account, was originally led to Moriarty by the
suggestion that many of the crimes he perceived were not the
spontaneous work of random criminals, but the machinations of a vast
and subtle criminal ring. In such a way, he is described as a Consulting
Criminal, the opposite of Holmes, a Consulting Detective.

Moriarty plays a direct role in only one other of Doyle's Holmes stories:
The Valley of Fear, which was set before "The Final Problem," but
published afterwards. In "The Valley of Fear", Holmes attempts to
prevent Moriarty's agents from committing a murder. Moriarty does not
meet Holmes in this story. In an episode where Moriarty is interviewed
by a policeman, a painting by Jean-Baptiste Greuze is described as
hanging on the wall; Holmes remarks on another work by the same
painter to show it could not have been purchased on a professor's
salary. The work referred to is La jeune fille à l'agneau; some
commentators have described this as a pun by Doyle upon the name of
Thomas Agnew of the gallery Thomas Agnew and Sons, who had a
famous painting stolen by Adam Worth, but was unable to prove the
fact.